Cataphora, expletives and impersonal constructions in the history of Icelandic Universiteit Gent
This paper presents a diachronic account for the emergence of the expletive thorn ao in Icelandic impersonal constructions. Using data from the IcePaHC corpus (Wallenberg et al. 2011), I show that a cataphorically referential thorn ao functions as a topic position placeholder in Old Icelandic (1150-1350) in impersonals with a clausal argument. The corpus findings indicate that thorn ao spread from this early cataphoric context to impersonals ...